"We're Easterners," Chris Berman, Ley's colleague at ESPN, said. "We've never been in an earthquake."

Twenty years ago Saturday, Ley and Berman and a host of ESPN workers were shaken in a way they will never forget. They all were at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, getting ready for Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and Athletics, when the rumbling began minutes before game time. The earthquake registered 7.1 on the Richter scale.

"I heard it before I felt it," Ley said. "It sounded like a beer truck backing up, but we were too high for that. You come out of your seat, and it's like trying to stand on a waterbed, except (that) it's concrete. And then you look out and you see where the railing is across the horizon."

ESPN wasn't even a baseball rightsholder in 1989, but what the network did in the hours after the earthquake enhanced its news-gathering reputation more than any single event in its history.

The network truck had its own diesel generator, so while much of the region was blacked out, ESPN was able to provide live reports.

"We were left with power and two telephone lines," Ley said. "We gave one line to the San Francisco police department. It happened at 5:04 (PDT), and we were on the air at 5:19 or 5:20 for three or four hours. For much of that time we were the only images coming out of there.

"What I remember more than anything — and it was a horrible tragedy; 66 people died, many of them in Oakland — people who worked with us. You talk about pulling together. They did exactly what they needed to do without being told. There were no cellphones in those days, relatively speaking. We had walkie-talkies."

The World Series was suspended for 10 days, after which the A's won two anticlimactic games to finish a sweep of the Giants.

"The amazing thing was that everybody who was there, independently working for us, knew in that 20 seconds, knew that we went from covering the World Series to covering something bigger. We didn't know what it was, how big it was, but we knew it was something big."